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Citation: Stokoe, Brian (2014) The Exemplary Career of EO Hoppé: Photography, Modernism and Modernity. History of Photography, 38 (1). pp. 73-93. ISSN 0308-7298

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URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2013.815478 <http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2013.815478>

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1

The Exemplary Career of E. O. Hoppé: Photography, Modernism

and Modernity

Brian Stokoe

This article critically examines the landscape and cityscape photography of E. O. Hoppé.

In Picturesque Great Britain (1926), Hoppé presented a vision of the nation refracted

through the prism of an older Pictorialist aesthetic, whereas his later works, Romantic

America (1927) and Deutsche Arbeit (1930), offered a more enthusiastic interpretation

of the urban industrial world. Indeed the latter volume is very much in the style of Die

Neue Sachlichkeit. Hoppé’s photography is, therefore, characterised by a high level of

visual mutability as he shifted styles to suit publication needs, and he appears a

particularly adept commercial opportunist. Elsewhere, Hoppé’s work appeared

simultaneously in contexts that rejected the technological utopianism of the New

Objectivity and Amerikanismus. In Germany, American Zivilisation was often

understood to be a threat to a more traditional Kultur, and Hoppé’s work was also

published in contexts characterised by a reactionary modernism that aimed at a

reconciliation of the old with the new. This article analyses the cultural, commercial and

ideological forces that helped shape Hoppé’s work in Britain, Germany and the United

States.

Keywords: Emil Otto Hoppé (1878–1972), Kurt Hielscher (1881–1948), Charles

Masterman (1873–1927), Picturesque Great Britain, Romantic America, Deutsche

Arbeit, photobook, reactionary modernism, modernity, Amerikanismus.

2

The photographer Emil Otto Hoppé is known chiefly for that earlier part of his career

when he became the most well known celebrity portraitist of the Edwardian period.

Born in Munich in 1878, Hoppé arrived in London in 1902 while en route from

Germany to Shanghai where he was to work in his uncle’s export business. As a young

man enthralled by metropolitan life, however, he remained to take up a position with the

Deutsche Bank, in Lombard Street. It was also in London that Hoppé began his serious

engagement with photography. Encouraged by such distinguished art photographers as

Alvin Langdon Coburn, Furley Lewis and John Cimon Warburg, Hoppé joined the

Royal Photographic Society (RPS) in 1903, and became a regular and successful entrant

to its exhibitions and competitions. But Hoppé’s ambitions reached far beyond the

world of high-art amateurism represented by the RPS. A commercially astute amateur,

Hoppé turned professional in 1907, after leasing a studio flat in Baron’s Court, west

London. From such modest beginnings, he gradually built an international reputation as

a refined portrait photographer who was both sympathetic to his clients’ social

aspirations and conscious of his role as mediator of their public image. In 1913, he

established his business in the elegant setting of Millais House, in Cromwell Place,

South Kensington, the former home of the Pre-Raphaelite painter. Hoppé quickly

gained recognition as a skilled chronicler of fashionable London society, and his

photographs began to appear regularly in the Sketch, the Graphic and the Tatler,

bringing both welcome publicity and important reproduction fees. He also established

his own picture agency, Dorien Leigh, in order to control publication and distribution.

Hoppé’s work was widely recognised as the product of a distinctive, creative mind, and

3

he is credited with having reinvigorated the high society portrait in a modern,

commercial setting.1

By the mid-1920s, however, Hoppé believed he had exhausted the possibilities

of professional portraiture, and he longed for a change of direction.2 Such an

opportunity arose in 1925, when he was commissioned to produce a book of

architectural and landscape photographs of his adopted country.3 The resulting volume,

Picturesque Great Britain, appeared the following year.4 Thereafter, Hoppé’s practice

shifted almost entirely in the direction of topographical and landscape photography.

Between 1925 and 1937, he illustrated volumes on the United States, Germany, India

and Australia, often with his own written commentary, and he also published half a

dozen books on London. However, this shift in his practice is interesting for reasons

which extend beyond his career history. Hoppé’s work from this period registers the

complex and often contradictory nature of the discourses engaged by photographers

depicting the modern world. These discourses are characterised, variously, by a positive,

enthusiastic response to the visual possibilities offered by the city and industry and,

alternatively, by an anti-modernity and nostalgia for a ‘disappearing’ way of life.

Hoppé’s work from this period demonstrates a kind of visual mutability, as if it might

be the work of two different photographers with variant, even antithetical, ways of

seeing the world. Such contradictions abound in Hoppé’s photography and reveal much

about the tensions and contradictions inherent in the experience of modernity itself.

Hoppé’s urban and industrial photographs also point to important shifts in the

cultural and commercial status of the medium – to the very modernisation of

photography itself – and the anti-modernity of the Pictorialist tradition from which

Hoppé emerged requires further definition here. Hoppé entered the profession at a time

4

of profound crisis for the art of photography. The established hierarchies of Pictorialist

societies typified by the RPS, with their repetitive and monotonous displays of stylised

genre themes, were becoming anachronistic and increasingly irrelevant. As David

Mellor has observed, ‘A good part of modern British photography between 1919 and

1939 was primarily concerned with the erosion of Pictorialism’.5 While art

photographers were keen to assert the medium’s aesthetic independence, many were

also engaging with, and reacting to, the emerging commercial structures offered by

advertising and publishing, accommodating or rejecting their new possibilities. Hoppé

is an exemplary figure in the way he negotiates a path between the different worlds of

Pictorialism and modernism, frequently adapting his working methods to suit

publishers’ requirements. A close analysis of his early topographical and landscape

work reveals much about his varied engagement with the new picture-making

opportunities offered by a modernising world. Beginning with Picturesque Great

Britain (1926), a publication that inaugurated a fundamental shift in Hoppé’s career,

this essay examines his later, very different, urban and industrial photography in the

United States and Germany.

Picturesque Great Britain

Picturesque Great Britain was published in Berlin by Ernst Wasmuth AG, in their new

and prestigious Orbis Terrarum series. Wasmuth had a rising reputation for the

production of lavish, large format, photographically illustrated books. Each volume

contained over three hundred, full-page photogravure reproductions, with captions in

four European languages, indicating the broad audience the publishers envisaged.

5

Hoppé devoted an entire year to this new project, and he made over five thousand

photographs from which were selected the final three hundred and four.6

As the flagship product of the Wasmuth publishing house, Orbis Terrarum was

one of the most successful series to emerge from the enormous expansion in

photographic book production in the 1920s. In uniting some of Europe’s best

contemporary photographers with the latest commercial advances in rotary gravure

printing, Wasmuth and the Rotophot AG printing works gave original form to the

quality international photographic book market in the interwar period. Hand-pulled

photogravure was already by this time the art photographer’s favoured method of

reproduction, and such preeminent artists as Alfred Stieglitz and Alvin Langdon Coburn

had made gravure a cornerstone of their practice.7 But newer advances in rotary

photogravure methods in Germany during the First World War now made mass-

production photogravure a practical reality.8 The success of the Orbis Terrarum series

was based on long gravure print runs that could both satisfy photographers’ demands for

quality as well as the publishing industry’s quest for a commercially viable gravure

process. From the very beginning, therefore, Hoppé’s landscape work was both

commercially defined and associated with the most advanced technical developments

that allied photography to an expanding publishing world.

Picturesque Great Britain, subtitled The Architecture and the Landscape, was

the first of two volumes Hoppé produced in this series, and it marked a major turning

point in his career. But Picturesque Great Britain was also implicated in contemporary

debates concerning the nation’s very identity in the modern world. In his collaboration

with Charles Masterman, who wrote a lengthy prefatory note, Hoppé found himself

allied to one of the most important cultural commentators on Edwardian Britain; one

6

who had been a longstanding and vociferous critic of urban industrial ‘progress’.

Hoppé’s late Pictorialist aesthetic fully complemented the nostalgia and cultural

pessimism of Masterman’s text. In its foregrounding of the rural and simultaneous

denigration of the urban and industrial, Picturesque Great Britain aided in sustaining a

highly partial perspective on Britain that continues to haunt the nation.

To begin with, the work is misleadingly entitled, for it is mostly to England that

Hoppé and Masterman attend. Indeed, the view seems still more partial when one

considers the rather elementary map, inserted immediately prior to the pictorial section,

which details the names of those locations represented. To the south of an imaginary

line drawn between the rivers Severn and Trent, the map is dense with locations; to the

north and west, however, it remains conspicuously underemployed. But such a line is

hardly the stuff of imagination, since it indicates a topographical division between the

southern downlands and the northern uplands. Yet its additional significance is as a

cultural division between northern and southern England: one bearing with it all manner

of implications of a north/south divide in the distribution of wealth and power. The clear

inference to be drawn from this selection was that much of northern England was

unsuited to Hoppé’s picturesque purpose or, indeed, to Masterman’s politics.

The partiality of Picturesque Great Britain was further emphasised by Hoppé’s

neo-Pictorialist aesthetic. The Pictorialist tradition in photography from which Hoppé

emerged in the early 1900s had been defined largely in anti-modern and anti-technical

terms, adopting the genres of conservative painting. It encompassed the portrait, the still

life, the nude (usually female) and the landscape (almost exclusively rural). Conceived

in pointed opposition to scientific, documentarist and emerging amateur practices, the

art of photography was constructed in terms of a late nineteenth-century craft

7

technology allied to a Symbolist or Pictorialist discourse that equated atmosphere with

aesthetic emotion.9 An overall softness of rendition was widely favoured, since a high

level of precisionism was considered the field of scientific rather than aesthetic enquiry.

While Pictorialists celebrated the individual and handicraft aspects of photography and

printmaking over and above potential mass production and distribution, they also

repeatedly concerned themselves with features of the handicraft and the pre-industrial

that lingered on in the modern world. For example, in London there developed a

nostalgic interest in the multiple variations of horse-drawn transport that had, by 1926,

almost entirely disappeared from the streets of the capital. Similarly, in a nautical

context, there was a preference for sail over steam, and the first image of Picturesque

Great Britain shows a view of the Thames, with a distant dockside seen through the

bowsprit rigging of a sailing ship (figure 1). Hoppé’s photograph is remarkably similar

in concept to a better-known picture by Coburn, made of the Thames, at Wapping,

while the latter was under the influence of James McNeill Whistler’s Nocturnes.10 Both

Coburn and Hoppé depict a slow-moving and tranquil city of soft mists, gentle dawn

light, or dreamlike dusks. Hoppé’s photographs were given an additional Pictorialist

inflection by being reproduced in sepia inks. He also frequently photographed against

the light, a technique that softened form and added atmosphere. Hoppé’s was a

commercially driven, attenuated version of Pictorialism – one more capable of rapid

adjustment to the requirements of commercial publishing. His vision derived from an

earlier age, and Picturesque Great Britain is pervaded by this sense of a late Victorian

eye at large in a modernising England that the photographer appears reluctant to

acknowledge. Hoppé’s apparent difficulties with the contemporary were important, too,

in that they tended rhetorically to reinforce the message of Masterman’s text, since his

8

essay is imbued with that same sense of alarm and cultural anxiety that had permeated

his writings for over twenty years.11

By the time he came to write his introduction to Picturesque Great Britain,

Charles Masterman was well known as a Liberal commentator on the state of the nation.

His most famous text, The Condition of England, appeared in 1909.12 The title derives

from Thomas Carlyle, for whom the Condition-of-England question was ‘the alpha and

omega of all!’, and there is something of Carlyle in Masterman’s urgent tones.13

Masterman’s was a decidedly pessimistic assessment, however. He despaired of ‘the

crumbling and decay of English rural life’ that had resulted from the demographic

transformation of the countryside, and he greatly feared the impact of increasing

urbanisation:

The cities have sucked in the healthy, stored-up energies of rural

England; with an overwhelming percentage today of country

upbringing. Must they ever thus be parasitic on another life outside,

and this nation divide into breeding-grounds for the creation of

human energies and consuming centres where these energies are

destroyed?14

In Masterman’s eyes, urbanisation and industrialisation worked together, parasitically

feeding off and debilitating the countryside, destroying the social stability and

continuity of rural life. With urban expansion came squalor, decadence, social

injustice, and the long-term corruption of the nation’s genetic bloodstock. The

9

Condition of England was infused with a Social Darwinist perspective that had come

to dominate such discussions since the 1870s. According to Gareth Stedman Jones:

Social Darwinism added a cosmic significance to the struggle

between the country and the town. Biologism provided a

framework for a comprehensive theory of hereditary urban

degeneration. […] In the eyes of the urban middle class, the

countryside had symbolised the forces of simplicity, strength,

phlegm, loyalty and deference.15

For Masterman, much of urban Britain functioned as the terrible, antithetical ‘other’

to rural England, with the latter conceived in pastoral terms. By 1925, when he came

to consider the visual spectacle offered by Hoppé’s photographs for Picturesque

Great Britain, there may have been stirred in him some recollection of the earlier

despair of The Condition of England. In its first chapter, entitled The Spirit of the

People, Masterman had suggested that there were some fundamental difficulties

besetting any contemporary assessment of the nation:

One of these is the difficulty of ascertaining where the essential

nation resides. […] A few generations ago that difficulty did not

exist. England was the population of the English countryside. […]

But no one today would seek in the ruined villages and dwindling

population of the countryside the spirit of an ‘England’ four-fifths

of whose people have now crowded into the cities.16

10

Masterman was clearly drawn to the powerful myths of the pastoral. In England, the

pastoral lies deep within the national consciousness, providing a dominant and enduring

image of our relationship to the land. Therein, the country is defined in opposition to

the city, with the former a place of leisure and repose where Man and Nature are

imagined to coexist without much effort, in contrast to the regulated ‘industry’ of the

latter. The pastoral is frequently invoked in periods of accelerated social transformation.

It combines an intense nostalgia for a ‘traditional’ rural England deemed to be under

threat, as well as a resistance to change, expressed in the desire to return to the

imagined stability of the social order of the past. It is a discourse structured, therefore,

upon a social as well as a geographical division between the country and the city.17 As

Martin Wiener has argued, there had developed by this time a predominant version of

Englishness that actively disavowed the nation’s industrial identity.18 Within this

polarising ideology, England was ‘the country’, a term which implicitly ignored urban,

industrial Britain, located principally in the north.

This self same cultural polarisation resulted in Picturesque Great Britain

including only five images of the industrial landscape. In Manchester, Hoppé

photographed canals surrounded by darkened mills and warehouses, seen in a watery,

perhaps early morning light (figure 2). These were reminiscent of contemporary

paintings of Lancashire made by Charles Holmes (1868–1936), in which industry was

given a primitive, pastoral treatment, devoid of people and activity, and these

photographs evoked an earlier industrial age before the coming of the railways. Such

images were temporally dislocated, making industry appear marginal to contemporary

life in Britain. In Sheffield, Hoppé photographed the interior of a steelworks and

11

showed the smoking exterior of another, but his was a restrained enthusiasm for the

industrial world. Here was the industrial landscape refracted through the nostalgising

lens of a Pictorialist sensibility, made either unthreateningly picturesque or,

occasionally, terrifying in its sublimity. But this was an aesthetic clearly more at home

in a rural setting. Indeed, the primary focus of Picturesque Great Britain was upon

quaint village churches, stately homes, castles, cathedrals and ancient bridges – an

architecture that betokened continuity, tradition and the legitimacy of the social order.

Some of the smaller towns were included but it was rural England that predominated; a

land of manor houses, thatched cottages and village pubs collectively untouched by

modernity (figure 3). Hoppé’s images demonstrated a kind of pastoral topophilia, in that

they offered reassuring subject matter in an equally reassuring pictorial form.

At the same time, Picturesque Great Britain managed to avoid any engagement

with the active social and economic life of the countryside. On the rare occasions when

they do appear, figures in the landscape are deployed as just so much picturesque

staffage – compositional devices that helped to achieve pictorial asymmetry (figure 4).

This subordination of figures also had the extended effect of seriously limiting the roles

they could play, and consequently there are no individualised social actors at work in

Hoppé’s landscape; rather, it appears a land upon which little work is done at all.

Picturesque Great Britain therefore offered a comforting view of Britain in the throes

of urbanisation.19 For Masterman, the problems of Britain’s future were written in the

landscape itself, and he believed that Hoppé’s photographs bore timely witness to a way

of life under siege by the forces of modernity:

12

How far this England will endure under the influence of the new

mechanical transport, which is sprawling the new town dwellers

into dismal architectural erections set in the heart of the old country

side, remains conjectural. Mr. Hoppé has seized the period before

the change which is coming; and which some dread and others

desire.20

Whereas The Condition of England has been assessed as ‘the classic description of the

tensions and tribulations of Edwardian England’, here Masterman’s essay appears a

valedictory tribute to that era’s social stability.21

While it undoubtedly marks a successful interweaving of Hoppé’s Pictorialist

aesthetics with Masterman’s cultural anxieties, Picturesque Great Britain is also

important as an early example of a commercial renovation of landscape photography.

Apart from signalling a significant change of direction for the photographer himself, its

publication marked the beginnings of the national photographic book within the idiom

of ‘refined’ tourism. The extensive Orbis Terrarum series permitted both domestic and

foreign places to be comfortably viewed at home, without the trouble and expense of

travel. As in his earlier portrait photography, Hoppé again showed himself an astute

judge of a new commercial outlet for his work.

Orbis Terrarum’s most prolific photographer was Kurt Hielscher, whose earlier

volume, Picturesque Germany, appeared in 1924.22 Mellor and Jeffrey have suggested

that Hielscher may have provided Hoppé with the essential model for Picturesque

Great Britain.23 Like Hoppé, Hielscher focused overwhelmingly on an unpopulated,

rural landscape and on the ancient architecture of the small towns, participating in a

13

similar sidelining of the urban and the industrial. Of some three hundred images, only

three of the port of Hamburg showed much evidence of modernity, while the short

introduction by the dramatist, Gerhart Hauptmann, demonstrated a cultural pessimism

remarkably akin to Masterman’s. In Hielscher’s photographs, Hauptmann discerned an

older, traditional Germany as yet untouched by ‘the prosaic spirit of mere utility’, but

one under threat by modernising forces from across the Atlantic.24 Germany’s historic

architecture, he believed, endured as a physical testament to its very soul, and

Hauptmann feared that, ‘when American steel structures have replaced the last

Romanesque, the last Gothic, and the last Renaissance building, secular or sacred, then

indeed will everything have perished that with a throbbing heart we now call

Germany’.25 From its inception, therefore, the market profile of Orbis Terrarum was

characterised by an explicit, cultural conservatism. The example of Picturesque

Germany would have given Hoppé a clear indication of themes that were both

commercially and ideologically viable.

But if industrialism was not natural to the ‘spirit’ of either Britain or Germany,

to whose was it? As Wiener has accurately observed, for an answer to this question one

would have been directed, from the latter part of the nineteenth century, toward

America. In the minds of European cultural commentators, America and industry were

understood to intermesh quite naturally, so long as its unrestrained commercialism and

idolatry of technological progress could be held at a distance. In his News from

Nowhere (1890), William Morris had derided America as a wasteland and ‘a stinking

dust-heap’ and, as Wiener notes, ‘[by] the turn of the century, such sentiments had

become clichés of educated opinion’.26 For Morris, America was a warning of what

might befall a nation that offered little resistance to what he regarded as the

14

dehumanising and homogenising tendencies of industrial capitalism. Later, Antonio

Gramsci’s analysis of Americanism drew parallel attention to the economic and cultural

tensions between, ‘on the one hand the old, anachronistic, demographic social structure

of Europe, and on the other hand an ultra-modern form of production and of working

methods [...] the biggest collective effort to date to create a new type of worker and of

man’.27 In Britain, attitudes were broadly summed up by C. E. M. Joad in The Babbitt

Warren (1926), which depicted America as a land obsessed by work, money and the

machine.28

Romantic America

Within the overarching context of such dominant European attitudes, Hoppé was

commissioned, in 1926, to produce an Orbis Terrarum volume on the United States. In

that year, he travelled extensively across the continent, taking eleven months to make

several thousand images in a variety of settings where the urban, industrial and

commercial themes, so diligently disregarded in Picturesque Great Britain, could hardly

be resisted. Romantic America, subtitled Picturesque United States, was published the

following year.29 The nostalgic sepia of Picturesque Great Britain was now replaced by

a neutral monochrome more suggestive of contemporary actuality.

The book begins, as did Hoppé himself, with New York City. If Orbis Terrarum

was marked by a conservative cultural politics in fear of what the Germans called

Amerikanismus, when faced with the landscapes of modernity offered by New York its

conservative aesthetic endured, albeit in a more subtle fashion. Reproduced in

photogravure, which softened form and generated atmosphere, Hoppé’s photographs

15

resembled images made by Alfred Stieglitz as far back as 1910.30 They also seemed

occasionally marked by the hazy atmospherics of Coburn’s New York, published that

same year. Hoppé was, of course, very familiar with both photographers’ work. His

pictures of contemporary actuality were, therefore, filtered through an older, Pictorialist

aesthetic; one that rejected a modernist insistence upon the ‘straight’ photograph (figure

5). In addition to the softening effects of gravure, Hoppé often photographed against the

light, a technique he had usefully employed in Picturesque Great Britain. He also

photographed the streets of New York at night, and this added further ‘romance’, an

ambiguous catch-all phrase that recurs all too often in his writing. Accordingly, while

Hoppé’s subject matter might superficially appear to bear the mark of ‘the modern’, this

was the modern seen in terms that were decidedly outmoded. Most of all, Hoppé’s

conservatism was revealed by what might usefully be described as an emphatic and

persistent compositional completeness (figure 6). This was a trope that derived from

Pictorialism, which had in its turn borrowed its conventions from conservative genres of

painting. In Hoppé’s photographs, New York appeared composed, complete and entire,

a city fully formed. Yet, as is evident from contemporary films such as Charles Sheeler

and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921) or Robert Flaherty’s Twenty-four Dollar Island

(1926), the reality was that New York remained a dynamic, yet incomplete, ‘work in

progress’. Hoppé’s aesthetic also stood in stark contrast to that adopted and developed

by contemporary European photographers like László Moholy-Nagy, Werner Gräff and

André Kertész. These photographers proposed a new vision of urban industrial

iconography that emphasised the role of the photographer as a perceptive, itinerant

observer, newly armed with mobile 35mm technology and freed from the constraints of

the tripod. Their work derived from a dynamic interaction with the cityscape. Fully

16

engaged with the transient, they did not take the time, nor would they have

comprehended the need, to stand back and compose with such care. Arguably, their

work more accurately reflected the impermanence and discontinuities of urban existence.

The profound stasis of Hoppé’s compositions seemed derived from the aesthetics of

another age.

But photographers have frequently looked beyond the world of photography for

stimulus, and it is clear from Hoppé’s autobiography that there were other influences at

work:

From the moment when the late Joseph Pennell showed me his

remarkable lithographs of New York, I was attracted to the pictorial

possibilities of American cities. Most of the pictures one had seen

depicted the pulsating stream of life flowing through them, but I

felt more strongly than anything else their static qualities, their

loneliness and grandeur. Despite modernistic architecture, their

effect on me was one of monumental primitiveness, vividly calling

to my mind the communal dwellings of ancient Taos, in New

Mexico, but enlarged to a gigantic scale.31

Pennell’s was a monumentalising aesthetic in which the human figure, if it was included

at all, existed only as a vaguely perceived shadow, a figurative generalisation. There

was, then, little expressed interest in the city as a problematic, social phenomenon that

might require appropriately social solutions. Pennell’s influence is additionally curious

in that, having defined the whole genre of big-city illustration in the last two decades of

17

the nineteenth century, the artist was highly resentful of photographers invading his

domain. In 1897, he had published a diatribe against photography, fully detailing what

he regarded as the medium’s aesthetic shortcomings as a mechanical and, he believed,

inartistic process.32 Some of Hoppé’s New York pictures had been included in his

earlier, one-man exhibition at London’s Goupil Gallery in 1922, and a selection

appeared in The Studio magazine.33 One picture was entitled Grand Canyon, a title that

appears to have been borrowed from Pennell’s earlier work. It showed the modern

thoroughfares of New York overshadowed by structures that turned streets into dismal

chasms.

On the other hand, from the early 1920s Hoppé was clearly experimenting with

compositional methods. The Studio had published an innovative view, entitled ‘Towards

Manhattan’, with the island’s skyline seen through the cables of Brooklyn Bridge. It is a

curious image that combines a modernist viewpoint with antiquated, Pictorialist

atmospherics. This technique of looking through one structure to view another was one

he was to use time and again, and it represented a useful commercial renovation of a

frequently abused Pictorialist technique whereby foliage was used to frame a landscape.

In this case, Hoppé anticipated the pictures made of this same scene in 1929 by Walker

Evans. A similar image was included in Romantic America, with the grid-like

composition suggestive of the city’s geometric layout (figure 7). Elsewhere, Hoppé

focuses less on the locus of industry than on its materiality. An acute instance of this

occurs in the photograph he made in Pittsburgh, misleadingly entitled, Ohio River from

the Point (figure 8). In the distant haze one can just about discern something that might

indeed be the Ohio River, and make out the imprecise outlines of a blackened industrial

landscape. But onto this dismal scene Hoppé has superimposed a complex matrix drawn

18

from the interpenetrating diagonals of a bridge structure. In so doing, he partakes of a

particularly modernist concern, because not only does Hoppé draw attention to the

substance of rivets and steel – to the materiality of industry – he also directs attention to

the materiality of the photograph itself, to its superficial qualities. This concentration

upon surface, or formal articulations, was a characteristic feature of photographic

modernism in the 1920s, but Hoppé was rarely so radical a picture maker, preferring

instead a more conventional approach that may have offered a broader commercial

appeal.

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Hoppé wrote extensively and enthusiastically

about the role he envisaged for photography in the industrial age. Indeed, he was clearly

aware of new aesthetic developments as photographers responded to an increasing

commercial role born of an urbanising society driven by technological progress. In May

1928, Hoppé wrote and illustrated an article for the journal Engineering Progress,

entitled ‘The Romance of Steel and Cement’, in which he enthused about what he

regarded as the symbiotic relationship between the photographic medium and the

industrial world: ‘Here is a blending of art and science, or art and mechanism, that can

meet the subject on its own ground’.34 The article’s first page purported to show an

image of a Pittsburgh steelworks, entitled Steam and Smoke. But this photograph had

already appeared in Picturesque Great Britain as a Sheffield steelworks, and Hoppé

routinely reassigned different identities to his photographs. For example, in his later

book The Image of London (1935), a photograph of Lots Road power station on the

Thames, at Chelsea Creek, was given a new, fictitious existence as Battersea power

station. This was by no means a new phenomenon. In his portraits of working-class

19

‘characters’ in London and New York, Hoppé frequently invented new identities for his

subjects to suit publication demands.35

Overall, there is also a sense that Hoppé liked to present himself as a more

devoted modernist than he actually was. While his writings are full of his avowed

enthusiasm for new 35mm technology, the E. O. Hoppé Estate Collection’s files contain

an extremely small number of 35mm negatives (indeed, less than one per cent of the

total). Again in 1928, Hoppé contributed an article entitled ‘Photography in England’ to

the new German photographic annual Das Deutsche Lichtbild that, at least superficially,

seemed to represent a form of aesthetic revisionism. Hoppé mapped out a neo-

modernist programme that rejected ‘the cult of soft-focus work’ and the ‘sham works of

art’ resulting from what he saw as the Pictorialists’ conflation of painting and

photography. He claimed that a ‘reaction from this delusory attitude is already

gathering force’.36 Das Deutsche Lichtbild was to become a leading showcase for the

vanguardist work known as Die Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), much of which

evidenced an anti-Pictorialist preference for the ‘straight’, unmanipulated photograph

that was often allied to a celebration of urban and industrial themes.37 Later, in 1933, in

a more domestic context, Hoppé contributed an introduction to The Studio’s prestigious

Modern Photography annual that was gaining a reputation for a similar aesthetic

position. In a text reminiscent of modernist declarations by Renger-Patzsch and Paul

Strand, Hoppé pointed to a new age of photographic practice. Photography in 1933, he

wrote, was vastly different from 1927, as photographers adjusted their practice to other,

more commercial criteria. In place of Pictorialist sentiment, he argued, this New

Photography had ‘pointed the way to “an adventure of seeing”. […] Its code is a total

absence of sentimentalism’.38

20

Hoppé’s was, nonetheless, a conservative response and he rebuffed the

enthusiasms of the more radical adherents to the New Photography: ‘To exploit

eccentric points of view, take pictures from strange angles, pointing the camera

vertically upwards or making dizzy downward shots, is not necessarily proof of an

inventive mind. […] There has been an overdose of this hocus-pocus’.39 As these and

other declarations imply, Hoppé’s manifest commercial success lay in him being, to

borrow Ian Jeffrey’s description, ‘a Victorian in modern times’, and ‘an especially

adept mediator, able to present the new in traditional terms’.40 However, Hoppé’s most

thorough engagement with the urban, industrial world was still to come.

Deutsche Arbeit

In 1930, Ullstein Verlag published Deutsche Arbeit: Bilder vom Wiederaufstieg

Deutschlands (German Work: Pictures of Germany’s Reascendance). It is, in many

respects, a remarkable book, although one that has received scant critical attention.41 In

the late 1920s, Hoppé travelled extensively through Germany making photographs of its

major industrial complexes. Deutsche Arbeit presents the reader with a systematic,

visual assessment of German industrial progress and processes. Beginning with a series

of photographs of power sources (Quellen der Kraft) such as coal, oil and gas, Deutsche

Arbeit moves on to the theme of energy distribution (Strömende Energie), and ‘Ore

becomes Steel’ (Erz wird Stahl). There is an extensive section on transport, entitled

‘Conquering Distance’ (Überwundener Raum), and a final section on industrial

production with the general title ‘In the Workshop’ (In der Werkstatt) (figure 9).42 The

photographs are reproduced in a deep-toned photogravure that is of an even richer

21

quality than Orbis Terrarum and, despite the depth of tone, a number of the images

have luminous, almost metallic highlights (figure 10).43 The influence of Pennell seems

persistent, however, in the photographs’ overwhelming gloom. Pennell had made

hundreds of etchings and lithographs of factories, shipyards, canals and mines. Many of

these images presented a view of industrial processes taking place in scenes of infernal

misery, with factory workers only vaguely defined. This overall gloom is a persistent

feature of Hoppé’s photographs of German workshop interiors, combined with a sense

of menacing, almost diabolic power.

Deutsche Arbeit is also unusual, perhaps unique, in that it has a reversible

dustjacket (figure 11). On one side is a colourful, graphic design featuring an industrial

landscape of smoking chimneys; on the other, a monochrome photograph shows a

ship’s propeller and rudder assembly. This may have arisen through a difference of

opinion between author and publisher. While the book begins with a frontispiece

portrait of an anonymous, German worker, Hoppé dwells for the most part on

impressive industrial structures. These photographs are in some ways reminiscent of

Die Neue Sachlichkeit imagery to be seen later in Eugen Diesel’s well known, Das

Werk (Work, 1931) in Die Blauen Bücher series, as well as in the equally populist

Technische Schönheit (Technical Beauty, 1929), by Hanns Günther (figure 12). Indeed,

a version of the Hoppé dustjacket photograph had already appeared in Günther’s earlier

volume.44 The photography of Die Neue Sachlichkeit generally gave a dramatic and

monumentalised view of German industry, but its technological utopianism was

inevitably cut short by the realities of the Depression.

Still more remarkable, however, is Bruno H. Bürgel’s introductory text to

Deutsche Arbeit, entitled ‘The Ode to Work’. It has become something of a

22

commonplace of photographic historiography to describe the medium’s progressive

engagement with the technological utopianism of the Weimar period, and to speak of

photography’s role in the contemporary optimism about technical advance.45 However,

photographers were also engaged in another, very different, response to urbanisation

and the Maschinenzeit, one described by Jeffrey Herf as ‘reactionary modernism’.46 As

Herf notes, compared with England and France, German industrialisation ‘was late,

quick, and thorough. Economic units were large and state intervention extensive. Most

important, capitalist industrialisation took place without a successful bourgeois

revolution’.47 Herf’s principal argument seems essential to any understanding of the

cultural context in which Deutsche Arbeit was produced and understood.

Both before and after the beginning of the Nazi period, Herf suggests, an

important current within conservative and National Socialist ideology achieved a

successful reconciliation between anti-modernist, romantic and irrationalist ideas and an

apparently anomalous enthusiasm for technological advance. The thinkers to whom he

refers as reactionary modernists never described themselves as such, but nevertheless:

this tradition consisted of a coherent and meaningful set of metaphors, familiar

words, and emotionally laden expressions that had the effect of converting

technology from a component of alien, Western Zivilisation into an organic

part of German Kultur. They combined political reaction with technological

advance.48

If Germany could be both technically advanced and true to its soul, the idea of

industrial progress might be disassociated from the Amerikanismus that Hauptmann had

23

so vehemently deplored and turned, instead, into a virtue of German Kultur. This

reactionary modernism could incorporate modern technology into the thinking of

German nationalism, ‘without diminishing the latter’s romantic and antirational aspects.

The reactionary modernists were nationalists who turned the romantic anticapitalism of

the German Right away from backward-looking pastoralism’.49 Some of the writers and

intellectuals of the Weimar years, such as Ernst Jünger, are easily identifiable as

belonging to Herf’s reactionary modernist circle, along with the likes of Oswald

Spengler and indeed, Eugen Diesel, son of the eponymous inventor of the compression-

ignition engine. But Ronald Taylor has identified certain working-class, lyric poets who

could also be understood to fall within this same group.50 These worker poets

celebrated a proletarian nationalism, one that avoided the ideals of socialist revolution

and instead fetishised the nobility and heroic qualities of labour in an age of mass

production. Most prominent of these poets, who went under the name of a proletarian

writers’ union known as the Werkleute auf Haus Nyland, were Gerrit Engelke, Max

Barthel, Karl Bröger and Heinrich Lersch.

Bürgel’s Ode to Work begins with some emotionally charged verse by the

boilermaker poet Lersch that effectively sets the ideological mood of Deutsche Arbeit:

Open up, gates; spring open, doors!

What makes people curse and rejoice,

Why hate and joy awaken,

I want to see! Want to see what broadens fists and shoulders,

What makes the soul swell and widens the eyes,

What bends the back and torments the lung, —

24

What spoils one person and strengthens the other,

What elevates one and eats up the other:

I want to see, what work is!

The rushing, roaring race of work!

Open up, gates; spring open, doors!51

Here was an emotive language that stressed individual experience and subjectivity

rather than class-consciousness – a language that lent weight to notions of fate, or of a

national destiny beyond the individual’s control. Its vocabulary derived from a

technological romanticism that enthused about the simultaneous threat, and promise, of

unrestrained mechanical power; and this was an aestheticisation of politics and the

Maschinenzeit that was to become characteristic of Nazi ideology. Unsurprisingly,

Lersch’s cultural politics led him to endorse the new administration and he was

promptly appointed, in 1933, to the literature chamber of the Reich’s Kulturkammer.52

Later in his introduction, Bürgel turns again to verse, this time in the form of the

Belgian Symbolist poet, Emile Verhaeren:

Here, between the walls of stone and steel

Suddenly, erupts

The elements’ fervent force.

Iron jaws grabbing and gobbling,

Giant hammers grinding and breaking

Bars of gold on anvils.

And over there, in that far corner, we seek

25

To force back into shape

The white, hissing minerals,

Which are pouring into the open unleashed

And giving the room a fiery glow.53

Such an emotionally fiery discourse appeared to be devoid of an explicit politics but its

implicit message was one of an industrial and cultural renewal born of violence and

rupture with the past. Here was a nation in a white-hot crucible, able to be forged anew,

perhaps by a new politics. Hoppé’s images of workshops and furnaces only added

further weight to this emotive, elemental language. In this same context, there is also

Deutsche Arbeit’s subtitle to be considered. The term Wiederaufstieg, translated earlier

as ‘reascendance’, carries further connotations that would not have been lost on

contemporary readers. Its additional nuances suggest ‘resurrection’, and such a term

inevitably implies an earlier ‘crucifixion’. For many Germans, especially those who had

lived through the inflation years after the First World War, any hint of crucifixion might

reasonably have brought to mind the punitive terms of the Versailles Diktat, the treaty

by which Germany was obliged to take both moral and financial responsibility for the

war. Accordingly, Hoppé’s photographs were to be interpreted through Bürgel’s quasi-

expressionistic, nationalist agenda that saw salvation in industrial power. The world

was again taking notice of Germany:

A world which once held a deep grudge against us, is today full of admiration

and respect for our diligence, our initiative which has, in difficult times,

allowed us to move mountains. […] Machine! Cleverly thought-out steel

26

monster, created by man’s brains, you are both his slave and his master, both

liberator and oppressor. You stamping, striding, gliding, rolling, droning

colossus, you are the rhythm and tempo of the new age, lapsing time and space,

force and matter. Machine! You giant both idolised and cursed.54

The publication of Deutsche Arbeit was badly timed, however. It appeared immediately

after the economic crash of late 1929, which then inaugurated the Great Depression. As

unemployment climbed to its peak in 1932, the machines would slow and grind to a halt.

Yet this was not the only publication in which Hoppé’s photographs were

framed by a reactionary, nationalist discourse. In 1932, his work appeared (along with

that of Renger-Patszch, Dr Paul Wolff and others) in Max Jungnickel’s Volk und

Vaterland (People and Fatherland), and its overall discourse tends to confirm Herf’s

analysis of reactionary modernism’s ability to integrate the traditional with the new.55

The book’s picture editor, Heinz Schnakenburg, made extensive use of already well

established themes, such as gothic architecture and the medieval buildings of the small

towns, that had been the stock in trade of earlier volumes. But intermingled with this,

by now, somewhat clichéd selection, one finds a surprising number of photographs that

point to the widespread integration of modern, urban industrial subjects into what had

hitherto been a more obviously völkisch, ruralist agenda. Schnakenburg also includes

images of radio towers, modernist architecture, aerial photographs of the great cities

and, yet again, Hoppé’s shipyard image from the cover of Deutsche Arbeit. The clear

message is one of a reconciliation or synthesis of the old with the new. In his

introduction, however, Jungnickel directs his readers’ attention to what he perceived to

be an imminent change in the German social order:

27

Liberalism is dying. […] Tomorrow it will be gone. […] The “I”

has become “We”. The nation is on the move. The secrets

of a new era are intriguing us. Storm birds have risen. […]

slogans are rising like eagles. The nation wants to build a new Germany.56

In Schnakenburg’s editorial hands the photographs in Volk und Vaterland were subtly

organised in support of a reactionary modernist vision of Germany’s future that could

successfully unite contemporary industrial expansion with a more traditional, rural

image of the nation. In this connection, one therefore questions whether Hoppé was

fully aware of the contexts in which his images were beginning to appear, and whether

he exercised much editorial control over his work, beyond that of supplying appropriate

images on demand.

In their expressionistic passion and nationalistic fervour, respectively, both

Bürgel’s and Jungnickel’s discourses offered a worrying foretaste of things to come. By

the late 1930s, Hoppé must surely have been aware of the rapid Nazification of German

photographic culture. Even a cursory examination of editions of the photographic

annual Das Deutsche Lichtbild reveals major shifts of emphasis after 1933: a

pronounced return to völkisch, peasant themes, a new enthusiasm for images of troop

formations, airships and military aircraft, with Nazi insignia much in evidence, and

likewise, portraits of Hitler and his acolytes. In photographic book production, there

was a general and sudden return to gothic Frakturschrift, and this rapidly replaced the

modernist, sans-serif typefaces that had become characteristic of the New Objectivity

style.

28

Given this profound shift in German photographic culture one is more than a

little surprised to find that, in August 1938, Hoppé permitted some of his Austrian

landscape photographs to appear in the overtly Nazi publication, Freude und Arbeit

(Joy and Work).57 This was the official magazine of the international Freude und Arbeit

movement by which the National Socialists, ‘sought to reassure the world that, all

appearances to the contrary, the new Germany intended to make German work a factor

for peace between nations’.58 While Freude und Arbeit celebrated the movement’s

international range, it also gave prominence to images of Nazi success stories in areas

as diverse as industry and sport, with uniformed Nazi officials frequently overseeing

proceedings. The publication of Hoppé’s images in this context seems still more

surprising in that they appeared only some five months after the Anschluß of March

1938, whereby Germany annexed Austria. As a young man, Hoppé had spent much of

his life in Vienna, and he was enthusiastic about the cosmopolitan life of what had been

the heart of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Hoppé also maintained an Austrian country

home well into the 1930s: a farmhouse called ‘Edhof’, located in the remote village of

Molln, in the valley of the river Steyr. The four photographs included in Freude und

Arbeit are, themselves, typical of his rural landscape work, but here they were presented

in terms of an Englishman celebrating the tourist possibilities of what was now known,

in the Greater Germany, as the Ostmark, or Eastern March; an archaic term that was to

replace the centuries old Österreich. Hoppé wrote the commentary to his photographs

and, while the English translation makes passing reference to Austria’s previous name

‘before the Anschluss’, his text is an enthusiastic celebration of how an English

traveller might enjoy a tour around the country. A typical passage reads:

29

An excellent train leaves London at 3 p.m. en route for Bucharest. One should

alight at Linz, for centuries a quiet townlet [sic] nestling at the foot of mighty

hills, but now developing into an important centre of commercial and cultural

activity. While at Linz, one should not fail to take coffee at the Postlingberg, an

open-air café high up on the mountains.59

Here was a depoliticised discourse that could find charm and ‘romantic atmosphere’ at

every turn. The suggestion of a leisurely life of high-class tourism was further

underlined by the inclusion of an image of the headed notepaper of Hoppé’s private

club, The Savage, on London’s Carlton House Terrace.60 With Austria now redefined as

Europas Ferienland (The Playground of Europe), the bland language of travel and

tourism was quite incapable of acknowledging Austria’s contemporary political

problems. There is no suggestion here that Hoppé had any sympathies for the new

regime, and no evidence to suggest otherwise. In retrospect, however, his decision to

sanction the publication of these photographs in this context seems surprising,

inopportune and ill judged.

Conclusion

Mick Gidley has described Hoppé’s work as ‘protean, and not characterised by any

marked individual style’.61 A high level of visual mutability is very much a

characteristic of Hoppé’s landscape and industrial photography as he shifted back and

forth from a pictorialist to a neo-modernist approach. Jeffrey and Mellor are more

emphatic, regarding Hoppé as:

30

a classic example of a supremely successful photographer whose entire output

derived from successful prototypes in German, French and American

photography. This sort of alertness entailed massive alterations in style and

subject matter virtually from year to year: in a case like this the picture-maker

is nothing more than an efficient function of the market.62

Rather than haphazard mutations, such alterations in style indicate the high level of

commercial, aesthetic and technical flexibility that Hoppé brought to these national

topographies. When understood within the broader context of Britain in the 1920s, the

nostalgia and cultural pessimism of Picturesque Great Britain is entirely consistent

with a national reserve and, at times, intense discomfort about the impact of the modern.

In his choice of subject matter, and in his alliance with Charles Masterman, Hoppé

articulated a profound anxiety about the nation’s future in a period of accelerated

change. In his involvement with Orbis Terrarum, Hoppé helped define a whole new

market for photographically illustrated books, and such publications would continue to

be implicated in questions of national identity. Later, Hoppé’s Romantic America

engaged with that nation’s apparently unrestrained passion for the city and industrial

progress, with the grandeur of its cityscapes mediated through a kind of urban,

industrial sublime. Billed as ‘The First Popular Pictorial Presentation of our Country’,

Romantic America drew much of its inspiration from the iconographies of earlier forms,

exemplified by the work of Pennell, Stieglitz and Coburn, to name the most notable. All

three had a view of the city that was, in different ways, qualified and reserved. In

Germany, however, Hoppé at least appeared to be on more established territory.

31

The photographers of Die Neue Sachlichkeit had already created a new

industrial iconography that seemed fully at home in the modern world, but Hoppé

appears to have drawn freely from the plurality of available iconographies,

appropriating styles and genres as he went. He was a nostalgist in the face of the

English landscape, a reticent surveyor of American industrial progress, and a reserved

New Objectivist in front of German industry. Hoppé has been widely recognised as a

consummate commercial and aesthetic opportunist. In this latter case, however, the

dangers inherent in such opportunism were becoming increasingly clear as a reactionary

modernist discourse began to permeate and eventually dominate German visual culture.

Illustration Captions

Figure 1. E. O. Hoppé, London’s River, gravure plate reproduced from E. O.

Hoppé, Picturesque Great Britain: The Architecture and the Landscape, Berlin:

Ernst Wasmuth; and London: Ernest Benn 1926, 1. E. O. Hoppé Estate

Collection, Curatorial Assistance Inc., Pasadena, CA.

Figure 2. E. O. Hoppé, The Canal, Manchester, gravure plate reproduced from

E. O. Hoppé, Picturesque Great Britain: The Architecture and the Landscape,

Berlin, Ernst Wasmuth; London: Ernest Benn 1926, 218. E. O. Hoppé Estate

Collection, Curatorial Assistance Inc., Pasadena, CA.

Figure 3. E. O. Hoppé, Cottage at Southery, Norfolk, gravure plate reproduced

from E.O Hoppé, Picturesque Great Britain: The Architecture and the

Landscape, Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth; and London: Ernest Benn 1926, 187. E. O.

Hoppé Estate Collection, Curatorial Assistance Inc., Pasadena, CA.

Figure 4. E. O. Hoppé, Old Hostelry, Alfriston, Sussex, gravure plate reproduced

from E. O. Hoppé, Picturesque Great Britain: The Architecture and the

32

Landscape, Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth; and London: Ernest Benn 1926, 21. E. O.

Hoppé Estate Collection, Curatorial Assistance Inc., Pasadena, CA.

Figure 5. E. O. Hoppé, New York City, gravure plate reproduced from E. O.

Hoppé, Romantic America: Picturesque United States, Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth;

and New York: B. Westermann Co. Inc. 1927, 13. E. O. Hoppé Estate

Collection, Curatorial Assistance Inc., Pasadena, CA.

Figure 6. E. O. Hoppé, New York City, In the East Sixties, gravure plate

reproduced from E. O. Hoppé, Romantic America: Picturesque United States,

Berlin, Ernst Wasmuth; New York, B. Westermann Co. Inc. 1927, p1. E. O.

Hoppé Estate Collection, Curatorial Assistance Inc., Pasadena, CA.

Figure. 7. E. O. Hoppé, New York City, Manhattan, gravure plate reproduced

from E. O. Hoppé, Romantic America: Picturesque United States, Berlin: Ernst

Wasmuth; and New York: B. Westermann Co. Inc. 1927, 4. E. O. Hoppé Estate

Collection, Curatorial Assistance Inc., Pasadena, CA.

Figure 8. E. O. Hoppé, Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, Ohio River from the Point,

gravure plate reproduced from E. O. Hoppé, Romantic America: Picturesque

United States, Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth; New York, B. Westermann Co. Inc.

1927, p25. E. O. Hoppé Estate Collection, Curatorial Assistance Inc., Pasadena,

CA.

Figure 9. E. O. Hoppé, Steel Ingot under the steam hammer, gravure plate

reproduced from E. O. Hoppé, Deutsche Arbeit: bilder auf wiederaufstieg

Deutschlands, Berlin: Ullstein 1930, 49. E. O. Hoppé Estate Collection,

Curatorial Assistance Inc., Pasadena, CA.

Figure 10. E. O. Hoppé, High pressure turbine, Klingenberg, gravure plate

reproduced from E. O. Hoppé, Deutsche Arbeit: bilder auf wiederaufstieg

33

Deutschlands, Berlin: Ullstein 1930, 33. E. O. Hoppé Estate Collection,

Curatorial Assistance Inc., Pasadena, CA.

Figure 11. E.O. Hoppé, Reversible dustjacket to Deutsche Arbeit: bilder auf

wiederaufstieg Deutschlands, Berlin: Ullstein 1930. E. O. Hoppé Estate

Collection, Curatorial Assistance Inc., Pasadena, CA.

Figure 12. E. O. Hoppé, Tower crane in dockyard, gravure plate reproduced

from E. O. Hoppé, Deutsche Arbeit: bilder auf wiederaufstieg Deutschlands,

Berlin: Ullstein 1930, 71. E. O. Hoppé Estate Collection, Curatorial Assistance

Inc., Pasadena, CA.

1 – For a comprehensive overview, see Phillip Prodger and Terence Pepper, Hoppé

Portraits: Society, Studio and Street, London: National Portrait Gallery 2011.

2 – See E. O. Hoppé, Hundred Thousand Exposures, The Success of a Photographer,

London: The Focal Press 1945, 182–3.

3 – Hoppé became a British citizen in 1912. His naturalisation papers can be found in

the National Archives, London. Document reference HO 144/1169/214766. Special

Branch of New Scotland Yard briefly investigated him.

4 – E. O. Hoppé, Picturesque Great Britain: The Architecture and the Landscape,

Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth; London: Ernest Benn 1926.

5 – David Mellor, Modern British Photography, 1919–1939, London: Arts Council of

Great Britain 1980, 5.

6 – Hoppé, Hundred Thousand Exposures, 182.

7 – In this regard, see Mike Weaver, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Symbolist Photographer

1882–1966, New York: Aperture 1986.

34

8 – In 1916, the editor of the Penrose Annual noted the ‘wonderful strides’ made in

rotary photogravure, remarking however that progress was ‘not so evident in this

country as it is abroad’. William Gamble, ‘Position and Prospects of Process Work’,

The Penrose Annual and the Process Year Book, 21 (1916), 11–16.

9 – For a useful critique of Pictorialist aesthetics, see Allan Sekula, ‘On the Invention of

Photographic Meaning’, in Thinking Photography, ed. Victor Burgin, London:

Macmillan 1982, 84–109.

10 – See Alvin Langdon Coburn, 1882–1966, London: Arts Council of Great Britain

1978, unpaginated.

11 – It appears that Masterman’s text was written in response to Hoppé’s final selection

of pictures. Masterman had great experience in the use of photographs to influence

public opinion. During the First World War he was given responsibility for government

propaganda. See Ivor Nicholson, ‘An Aspect of British Wartime Propaganda’, The

Cornhill Magazine, 70:419 (1931), 593–606.

12 – Charles Masterman, The Condition of England, London: Methuen 1909.

13 – See Thomas Carlyle, ‘Chartism’ (1839), in Critical and Miscellaneous Essays,

volume 4, London: Chapman and Hall 1899, 121.

14 – Masterman, The Condition of England, 86–7.

15 – G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London, A Study in the Relationship between Classes in

Victorian Society, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1984, 130 and 150.

16 – Masterman, The Condition of England, 12–13.

17 – See Terry Morden, ‘The Pastoral and the Pictorial’, in Ten-8, 12 (1983), 18–25.

Morden draws on the rigorous explication of the pastoral discourse in literature

35

provided in Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, London: Chatto and Windus

1973.

18 – See Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit,

1850–1980, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1985.

19 – Ian Jeffrey and David Mellor note: ‘Photography has been of immense tactical

value in periods of accelerated cultural change when its denotational nature […] has

pushed it to the forefront when the problem of the future has appeared to be written in

the social landscape itself’. Ian Jeffrey and David Mellor, ‘Style and Ideology in British

Art and Photography, 1900–1940’, Studio International, 190:976 (July–August 1975),

27–34.

20 – Masterman, introduction to Picturesque Great Britain, vi.

21 – Edward David, ‘The New Liberalism of C. F. G. Masterman, 1873–1927’, in

Essays in Anti-Labour History, Responses to the Rise of Labour in Britain, ed. Kenneth

D. Brown, London: Macmillan 1974, 26.

22 – Kurt Hielscher, Picturesque Germany, Architecture and Landscape, New York:

Brentano’s 1924; and as Deutschland, Baukunst und Landschaft, Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth

1924. Such volumes rapidly replaced the successful series of John L Stoddard’s

portfolios of cityscapes published by the Werner Co., of Chicago in the 1890s.

23 – Jeffrey and Mellor, ‘Style and Ideology’, 29.

24 – Hauptmann, introduction to Picturesque Germany, vii.

25 – Ibid., vii.

26 – William Morris, News from Nowhere, London: James Redmond 1970, cited in

Wiener, English Culture, 89 and 190.

36

27 – Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, ed.

Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart 1971, 280–

1 and 302.

28 – C. E. M. Joad, The Babbitt Warren, London: Kegan Paul 1926.

29 – E. O. Hoppé, Romantic America, Picturesque United States, New York: B.

Westermann Co. 1927.

30 – See, for example, the Stieglitz portfolio of New York photographs published in

Camera Work, 36 (1911), and reprinted in Alfred Stieglitz, Camera Work: The

Complete Illustrations, 1903–1917, Cologne: Benedikt Taschen GmbH 1997, 582–7.

31 – Hoppé, Hundred Thousand Exposures, 187.

32 – Joseph Pennell, ‘Is Photography Among the Fine Arts?’ (1897), reprinted in

Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. Vicki Goldberg, New

York: Simon and Schuster 1981, 210–13.

33 – ‘Mr. E. O. Hoppé’s Photographs at the Goupil Gallery’, The Studio: A Magazine of

Fine and Applied Art, 83:346 (14 January 1922), 28–32.

34 – E. O. Hoppé, ‘The Romance of Steel and Cement’, Engineering Progress (May

1928), 131–2.

35 – See Brian Stokoe, ‘The Image of London: The Metropolitan Photography of E. O.

Hoppé’, The London Journal, 30:2 (2005), 40–65. For further evidence of Hoppé’s

indifference to reliable captions, see Brian Stokoe, ‘Class Tourism and Photography:

The Typological Portraits of E. O. Hoppé and J. D. Beresford’, History of Photography,

31:2 (Summer 2007), 180–200.

37

36 – A longer version of this text, included in a supplement at the back of the

publication, bears the shorter title ‘Photography’. E. O. Hoppé, Das Deutsche Lichtbild,

Berlin: Robert and Bruno Schultz 1928–29, unpaginated.

37 – Ibid. As editor Hans Windich remarked, ‘We dwell in towns, our meadows are

asphalt, our stars the arc-lamps, our woods the poles of the high-tension wires’.

38 – E. O. Hoppé Introduction to Modern Photography, London: The Studio Limited

1933–34, 13.

39 – Ibid., 13–14.

40 – Ian Jeffrey, ‘E. O. Hoppé: A Victorian in Modern Times’, in Cities and Industry,

Camera Pictures by E. O. Hoppé, York: Impressions Gallery 1978, 8.

41 – E. O. Hoppé, Deutsche Arbeit: Bilder vom Wiederaufstieg Deutschlands, Berlin:

Ullstein 1930.

42 – These systematic sections anticipate a later publication by Eugen Diesel entitled

Das Land der Deutschen (The Land of the Germans), Leipzig: Bibliographische Institut

AG 1931. Diesel employed mostly aerial photographs by Robert Petschow.

43 – Most of the images for this book derive from sharp and well-exposed, 5 x 4 inch

sheet film, so the softness appears to be derived from the gravure process itself and

perhaps also from Hoppé’s use of the split-exposure printing technique described in his

autobiography. Hoppé, Hundred Thousand Exposures, 23. Hoppé often used liquid

opaque to paint in highlights on his negatives.

44 – Eugen Diesel, Das Werk: Technische Lichtbildstudien, Königstein im Taunus: Karl

Robert Langewiesche Verlag 1931, and Hanns Günther, Technische Schönheit, Zürich

and Leipzig: Orell Füssli 1929.

38

45 – See, for example, Herbert Molderings, ‘Urbanism and Technological Utopianism:

Thoughts on the Photography of Neue Sachlichkeit and the Bauhaus’, in Germany, The

New Photography, 1927–33, ed. David Mellor, London: Arts Council of Great Britain

1978, 87–94.

46 – Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar

and the Third Reich, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1984.

47 – Ibid., 5–6.

48 – Ibid., 1–2.

49 – Ibid., 2.

50 – Ronald Taylor, Literature and Society in Germany, 1918–1945, Brighton: The

Harvester Press 1980, 85–6.

51 – Hoppé, Deutsche Arbeit, 5. With thanks to Steffi Boothroyd for all translations

from this volume.

52 – See Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure and

Consequences of National Socialism, London: Penguin Books 1973, 323.

53 – Hoppé, Deutsche Arbeit, 7.

54 – Ibid., 5–6.

55 – Max Jungnickel, Volk und Vaterland, Berlin: Safari 1932. Hoppé contributed

twenty-six of the 112 photogravure illustrations.

56 – Ibid., 5.

57 – ‘Ein Engländer fotografiert in der Ostmark’, Freude und Arbeit, III:9 (1938), 112

and 115.

58 – Joan Campbell, Joy in Work, German Work: The National Debate, 1800–1945,

Princeton: Princeton University Press 1989, 343.

39

59 – ‘Ein Engländer fotografiert in der Ostmark’, 112.

60 – Ibid.

61 – Mick Gidley, ‘Emil Otto Hoppé, Autobiography and Cultural Moments’, in The

Photobook: From Talbot to Ruscha and Beyond, ed. Patrizia Di Bello, Colette Wilson,

Shamoon Zamir, London and New York: I. B. Tauris 2012, 53.

62 – Jeffrey and Mellor, ‘Style and Ideology’, 28.